Ännu ett tips som ramlat in i mailboxen under helgerna: En läsvärd uppsats om fasetterad klassifikation för webben. Uppsatsen vänder sig dels till bibliotekarier som inte vet så mycket om hur man "datoriserar" sin klassifikation, dels till webbproducenter som inte hört talas om Ranganathan och co.

Gott nytt år till er alla! Barken rivstartar året med följande nyhet: Peter J Bogaards InfoDesign har fått en ny webbplats. Läs t ex historien om hur tunnelbanekartan i London kom till, år 1933. På webbplatsen kan man också anmäla sig till InfoDesigns nyhetsbrev som är bra men något svårläst. Kan man kanske hoppas på en förbättring även där?

Richard Saul Wurman myntade termen "information architecture" på 70-talet. I en intervju berättar han om ursprunget till termen:

The common term then was 'information design'. What got confusing was information design and interior design and industrial design, at that moment and still today in many and most people's minds, are about making something look good. Interior designers make your place look better, industrial designers were engineers doing something that usually went to an engineer to put a package around it. Information design was epitomized by which map looked the best - not which took care of a lot of parallel systemic parts. That is what I thought 'architecture' did and was a clearer word that had to do with systems that worked and performed. Thought 'architecture' was a better way of describing what I thought was the direction that more people should look into for information, and I thought the explosion of data needed an architecture, needed a series of systems, needed systemic design, a series of performance criteria to measure it. There are thousands of people using the term ('information architecture'), and they have no idea where the term came from, and 90 percent of them aren't doing what I think they should be doing anyway.